Molasses

This fresh seasonal sauce—so good you'll be glad to have leftovers—features less sugar than traditional barbecue sauces. Serve the moist, flavorful chicken on warmed burger buns. Wear rubber gloves when mincing the jalapeño so you don't burn your hands. When prepping the fresh cherries, wear a dark shirt, use a good cherry pitter, and work over two bowls: one for the pits and stems and the other for the usable flesh. Feel into the center of each cherry after pitting and de-stemming to make sure that no pit remains.

These spicy molasses cookies were a popular nineteenth-century New Orleans street food. For years, grocery stores throughout the United States have been selling them prepackaged, and often topped with white or pink icing.

I love a recipe like this, in which one familiar item (balsamic vinegar) combines with something else very familiar (in this case, the elements of a homemade barbecue sauce) to form something entirely new. The end result, which gets slathered all over spareribs that have been slow-roasted in the oven and baked at a high temperature until the two entities combine, makes for a sticky, tangy, unforgettable take on good old-fashioned ribs. If you're feeding a crowd, the oven is your best bet for that final step; if you have the time, though, try broiling the ribs with the glaze on top. The rib and the glaze fuse together and, if you take it far enough (just before it turns black), you get a crispy, sweet, and succulent rib that'll be your new standard from now on.

Amazingly, the New York Times fashion critic, Cathy Horyn, is also an accomplished cook and intrepid baker. The equivalent would be if I, a food writer, were also a sleek fashion plate with a deep bench of vintage and modern pieces. This is certainly not the case, so I find her extremely impressive. She claims that these cookies are a Swedish-American tradition in her hometown of Coshocton, Ohio, but I feel they are the cookie equivalent of Paris Fashion Week: a modern, edgy take on a classic. They are truly remarkable, with a robust and smoky undertone that sets them apart from other gingersnaps.

Another dessert cocktail made with oatmeal stout, the Oatmeal Cookie gets a spicy edge from Goldschläger, a Swiss cinnamon schnapps that has thin flakes of gold leaf floating in it.

A ham may be fully cooked and usually smoked as well, but another round in the smoker and a tasty glaze really take it to the next level. The apricot-soy combo here adds a sweet/salty taste to the outside of the ham. This recipe calls for a bone-in ham, but you can easily adapt it to any cooked ham. This is a great way to impress the family for the holidays and leave the oven available for other dishes.

This homemade cereal is hearty, wholesome, and filled with nutritious ingredients such as walnuts, rolled oats, raisins, and sunflower seeds. Granola is very flexible, so you can add whatever fruits and nuts are your personal favorites. This granola is great with milk or yogurt, or even as a topping on pancakes. Because raisins can make the granola soggy, we add them right before serving. The granola keeps well for a long time, so this is a big batch—it makes three pounds. Just keep it in an airtight container and eat it for breakfast all week, as we do at Bubby's or cut it in half to feed a smaller crowd.

In the halls of Winterfell, black bread is easy to find. Of course, bread can be found in many lands and nations, but the black bread of the North is fitting for its inhabitants. It possesses a darker color, higher fiber, and stronger flavor than other breads. It's denser as well, implying a great inner strength. Such food seems to symbolize the soul of the Stark family: gritty and stronger than anyone gives them credit for, with hidden resources that emerge when needed. Flavorful and healthy, it's both a treat and practical nourishment. (A Game of Thrones, Chapter 5—Jon)

As its name implies, this sauce is extremely versatile—you can brush it on chicken (whole or parts), ribs, steak, even vegetables. A small amount of butter is added at the end for a smooth finish; feel free to leave it out, especially if you’re using the sauce with a particularly fatty piece of meat.

We used apple juice to sweeten the bread, but this recipe is equally tasty made with orange juice or cranberry juice.

Leave a cool spot on the grill for cooking the roasts after they are glazed; turn them frequently to avoid burning.

What makes this version of rye different from the more popular German and deli ryes is the use of licorice-flavored aniseeds and fennel seeds, along with orange peel and a touch of cardamom. Nutritionists are now quantifying the therapeutic benefits of orange peel, licorice-flavored spices, and bitters as digestive aids that various traditional cultures have espoused for centuries. By making the bread with a combination of wild-yeast starter and commercial yeast, this formula creates an even more complexly flavored version of the bread than the more customary versions leavened only by commercial yeast. The lactic acid not only conditions the flour, predigesting it to an extent, but it also gives it a longer shelf life and better flavor. Think of this bread as a baked version of anisette.

Get back to basics, and take pleasure in baking your own nourishing bread.

You’ll know the holidays have arrived when the spicy aroma of gingerbread cookies fills your home!

These stuffed flatbreads are shaped much like meat-filled galettes. Lamb is the meat of choice in many Mediterranean cuisines, and here it is combined with other key ingredients of the region—eggplant and pomegranate—along with the warm aromatics often used in Turkish cuisine.

Our friend Philip Bernard of Raleigh, North Carolina, has plenty of hickory-smoked barbecue options, and still he’s a cheater. Philip likes to add molasses and vinegar to the pork butt to create a built-in sauce while it cooks. Be sure to trim the excess fat from raw meat in recipes like this when you want to serve the barbecue right away in its cooking liquid.

Great cookie recipes are to be honored and shared, passed from friend to neighbor to cousin. This recipe was passed down from one of my pastry chefs, Kimberly Sklar, who got it from her best friend’s husband’s mother, who happens to live in Cleveland.

After a year of 80-hour workweeks cooking in France, I moved to Boston, where I worked a very civilized 40 hours a week. With so much free time on my hands, I focused my attention that summer on making ice cream sandwiches. I sandwiched lemon ice cream with gingersnaps, coconut ice cream with macadamia nut tuiles, and mint ice cream with chocolate chunk cookies. My friends and neighbors could hardly keep up with the frozen cookie–ice cream combos that filled my freezer. Many summers later at Lucques, local farmer James Birch delivered several unexpected crates of his delicious Santa Rosa plums. We were drowning in summer fruit at the time, and I couldn’t imagine what on earth we were going to do with those extra plums. I remembered that hot Boston summer and decided to purée the plums into a sorbet and sandwich them between chewy molasses cookies. If it’s a truly lazy summer day, you can skip the sandwiching step and serve the sorbet in bowls with the cookies on the side.

Only on St. Patrick’s Day is it imperative that both your ice cream and your cake contain beer. Not your typical chocolate cake, and definitely not as intensely rich as the 1970s Moms’ Double-Chocolate Bundt Cake (page 112), this chocolate-stout cake has an unexpected kick to it. The addition of molasses, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg steers it into the spice cake category, with chocolate undertones and an indefinable depth from the dark, full-bodied stout. For me, the biggest surprise of this dessert is the Guinness ice cream. I’m a vanilla girl all the way, and when chefs use weird ingredients just for the sake of being different, I usually pass. But here the dark beer flavor really works in the ice cream to complement the cake. A touch spicy, it might just cure a hangover.